I’m getting a lot of ‘but my car is more convenient’ arguments lately, and I’m struggling to convey why that doesn’t make sense.
Specifically how to explain to people that: Sure, if you are able to drive, and can afford it, and your city is designed to, and subsidizes making it easy to drive and park, then it’s convenient. But if everyone does it then it quickly becomes a tragedy of the commons situation.
I thought of one analogy that is: It would be ‘more convenient’ if I just threw my trash out the window, but if we all started doing that then we’d quickly end up in a mess.
But I feel like that doesn’t quite get at the essence of it. Any other ideas?
There are limitations for the infrastructure. Not all people live in a nice organized way to facilitate vaguely cost effective mass transit routes. The volume of people particularly interested in the same 25 mile trip he is making at the same time may be like 3 or 4 people total, if that. Even if you had a bus route that connected, at least many of the legs would likely be an almost deserted bus, which would frankly be worse than the couple of cars it would keep off the road, in that scenario. It only makes sense if you can get some scale of passengers. In some areas, this is easy, but in many areas there just isn’t enough demand for specific points of interest to justify some larger scale transit.
My area has been going hard on walkable and mass transit, to some rather pleasant results. Unfortunately, about half the people in the general area cannot be reasonably served, because there are just too many sources and destinations and relatively little commonality to exploit. It’s great for those that are being served, but sometimes there just isn’t a good answer without forcing people to relocate their homes and businesses to an arrangement where mass transit actually could work.
The fact remains that “resolve the infrastructure” can’t work in a lot of the places where infrastructure doesn’t yet exist without mass forced relocations. So sure, the distribution of people and likely destinations may be a “systemic problem”, but one for which “build more infrastructure” is an inadequate answer.
Also, for a lot of places, the problematic scale of cars doesn’t come into play, so you don’t need to fix those. Energy is best spent identifying where the scale of cars does present an issue, refining that infrastructure, with a plan that includes how people transition between “car land”, “mass transit”, and “walkable”. In a place where it’s rural, then instead of a particular 25 mile trip being 2 or 3 people in a car, it would hypothetically become 2 or 3 people in an otherwise vacant bus, likely having to waste energy stopping at empty stops just in case, to stay on schedule. This is way worse than a car when so lightly loaded (particularly since the circuit may have the busses driving around vacant).
